Fable III Cares About Your Gamerscore

LOS ANGELES — Those numbers you rack up when you unlock Xbox 360 achievements are going to matter when you play Fable III.

During a demo at E3 Wednesday, game designer Peter Molyneux told Wired.com that the value of each player’s gamerscore will impact the way the game unfolds for them.

When designing the weapon-crafting system for the third entry in the action/role-playing videogame series, Molyneux and company wracked their brains trying to figure out how to make each sword unique. That’s when they had a revelation. “What was unique,” Molyneux said, “was you.”

So when a player makes a new sword in Fable III, their gamerscore will act as a kind of seed for the weapon — a random number that acts as the starting point of the blade’s development. Molyneux said he’s not out to reward folks who grind for achievements — a 100,000-point gamerscore won’t make a better sword than a score of 1,000, just a different one.

From there out, the sword will develop as you use it. Spill the blood of innocents and it will twist and gnarl. Die and it will gain notches. Once players are happy with their personalized swords (there are 88,000 combinations), they can sell them to other players online.